The short answer is no.
You know how it goes though, you have to make a good headline.
Here is exactly what Riley said.
“You can’t do that. You just can’t. It has happened to me in my career before. In the moment of truth, in ‘83 we lost Earvin Johnson, Bob McAdoo and Norm Nixon the first two games of the Finals against Philadelphia, and we got swept. In 1989, we lost Earvin Johnson and Byron Scott to strained hamstrings, and we got swept. You hope you can get there through the regular season, through the playoffs, through all those medieval moments and draconian moments in the playoffs when bodies are starting to hit the floor. The want on the part of both teams to win takes the physicality to another level and mentally you got to be ready for that, too. I hate to talk about it. It’s an excuse. I would have liked to win without Goran and Bam at 100 percent, but we just didn’t have enough. Jimmy is Superman. The two games that he had were two of the best games ever that I’ve seen in the Finals. The two triple-doubles to get us there, playing 47, 48 minutes, so, yes, don’t make me go back and do that, because I’ll think about it all winter and lament if only. Sometimes that’s what you’re dealt in the NBA Finals and you got to try to find a way to overcome it. If we had maybe more veterans or another player — we had a lot of young guys that all of a sudden really had to step up and do double time, and double down on their games and their performances. It’s not easy. But, yes, I’d like to see what it would have been like with everybody whole, but we’ll get that shot again. I’m just so proud of what our guys did. I’ll tell you another thing — the narrative about the end: The Lakers were great. They were a great team. They have the greatest player in the game today in LeBron and Anthony Davis, and a cast of real veteran players who knew what to do in those moments. So they beat us fair and square.
“They were the best team, but there’s always going to be asterisk, that caveat,” the team president said. “If we had Bam and Goran — Goran was our leading scorer in the playoffs — at 100 percent, it could have gone to seven games or whatever, but thank you for reminding me. I appreciate that, but I’m not going to look back on it. I’m just going to look at all the positive things, get Goran healthy and Bam healthy, and bring everybody back and try to add to the mix.”
Riley had to release a statement to explain what was clear in his full statement clearly meant.
“The asterisk is next to the Heat’s name, not the Lakers,” Riley said in a statement. “Their title is legitimate. Our loss has an asterisk (next) to it. The Lakers were the better team. Period.”
Flip the page to see what Riley had to say about if the HEAT can make a run with the same players next season.